Friday, December 18, 2009

One of the areas I am interest in is easy to use medical measurement devices. Weight, blood pressure, temperature, glucose, pulse, breathing, sleep patterns are among the measurements that can be recorded as part of proactive medicine. These will let us Age In Place much more successfully.

A key piece that is missing from this device, is wireless upload, you have to connect it to your PC via USB. The technology in the area of low power wireless short range communication has really shot forward. I think any device that does not easily transfer its measurements wirelessly to a personal computer or some home health gateway is not useful enough to really jumpstart proactive medicine.

As Walt points out, the other major missing aspect of this device is it lack of ability to upload it's reading to one of the Personal Health Record systems, for example Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health. This is key so that a person's doctor and caregivers can have near real time information about these measurements.

So this is the right direction, just not enough of a step forward yet. Give Mr. Mossberg's text or video review read/listen.

I am excited about wireless devices that will help us live a much more healthy and happy total life.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

I have been experimenting with the main online electronic personal medical records web sites. Mostly with Microsoft and Google's offerings. I have found both to be 'works in progress'. Microsoft's HealthVault is on the top of my list right now and the most mature and useable by normal, non-techies.

That said, the HealthVault product received a BIG negative rating mark from me today. I went into the site to add some blood pressure values and found that without notice they had modified their Silverlight based blood pressure data entry widget. I have no idea of all of the changes they made, right away just looking at the GUI you could sense a subtle change in the look. But the negative mark is give for transposing the SAVE and CANCEL button location! What DUMB move to make. It shows me that these developers still do not understand the human aspect of the user interfaces they develop and the profound changes that a change like this in a medical application could have.

On this day of the first flight of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, I can only think of the heads that would roll if a SAVE and CANCEL button were reversed on the flight deck before first flight!

A lot of work and education needs to be done in order to get electronic medical records moving forward successfully.

I have followed Microsoft's work on HealthVault for almost a year now, they are working hard to make a good product. So want to be positive and give them a lot of 'that a boys [and girls]'. But this change today is a example of the experience they need to gain.

I have using this data entry widget on a daily basis for six months now, and noticed when they converted from Adobe Flash tool to Microsoft's Sliverlight. That change, in itself, showed the same lack of experience in code updates and the effect on the application's user. They are still catching up to the speed of operation of the Flash based widget.

I am very sure that in the picture below, the two buttons shown are transposed from were they were located yesterday.

I could not find much info on using it with the Arduino platform. To get my feet wet I just moved an example program written for AVR PIC to Arduino's language. I have posted it below.

The Nordic communication chips seem to be a good product for low power, long life remote control. The questions of range and clashes with other products in the 2.4GHz bands are still open.

The steps to talk with the Nordic chips are very straight forward. It uses the SPI communications for interfacing and has a simple interrupt architecture for status [the code below does not use the interrupt]. The Sparkfun breakout board is a nice starting point as it allows hookup to either 5 volt or 3.3 volts products by providing onboard voltage for the Nordic. And the Nordic chips are natively able to talk 5 or 3.3 volt.

I will compare some of these functions and price points with some of the other similar products out there. The Texas Instruments wireless products are one set that I want to compare.

// nfr2401_02// 13-December-2009//// learning how to communicate with a Nordic nfr2401 wireless communications module.// this program will set up a nfr2401 as a receiver and receive data from the key presses on a Sparkfun Nordic nfr2401 keyfob.//// parts:// Transceiver nRF24L01+ Module with Chip Antenna Sparkfun sku: WRL-00691// Nordic FOB Sparkfun sku: WRL-08602// Arduino Deiecimila//

// based on Nordic-FOB-Tester-v10.c written by Nathan Seidle at Sparkfun.com in 6-19-2007// based on article and code 'Interfacing a Serial EEPROM Using SPI' at Arduino.cc by Heather Dewey-Hagborg

/* Arduino SPI register infoData registers simply hold bytes.For example, the SPI data register (SPDR) holds the byte which is aboutto be shifted out the MOSI line,and the data which has just been shifted in the MISO line.

Status registers change their state based on various microcontroller conditions.For example, the seventh bit of the SPI status register (SPSR) gets set to 1when a value is shifted in or out of the SPI.

The SPI control register (SPCR) has 8 bits, each of which control a particular SPI setting.

SPIE - Enables the SPI interrupt when 1SPE - Enables the SPI when 1DORD - Sends data least Significant Bit First when 1, most Significant Bit first when 0MSTR - Sets the Arduino in master mode when 1, slave mode when 0CPOL - Sets the data clock to be idle when high if set to 1, idle when low if set to 0CPHA - Samples data on the falling edge of the data clock when 1, rising edge when 0SPR1 and SPR0 - Sets the SPI speed, 00 is fastest (4MHz) 11 is slowest (250KHz)